OT: NYT article about the culture of sports at academic institutions
Sorry if already posted - I didn't see it in the archives - but the New York Times had an article about the cutlure of sports at colleges and how it was (potentially) having an adverse effect on the academic performance of the students.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/how-big-time-sports-ate-college-life.html?_r=1&hp
While I understand the consternation held by some of the professors at schools who see academics taking a back seat to athletics, many of the facts and figures they point to are not exclusive to athletics but instead are true for any major campus event. For example, they talk about the drop in GPA at Oregon when the football team does well, though (a) the number they quote (0.02 for men) seems rather small and (b) the timeframe for the data is rather short (Oregon has only been enjoying its current "elite" run for what, 3-4 years?). Also, they note that at one school students visiting the library and reading articles drops during sporting events, but they don't provide figures about similar usage around big school events like campus "holidays" (Halloween, St. Patrick's Day, etc.) and non-athletic events to see if that drop is a more general trend. And to point to China as an example of "laser focus" on academics is a little silly - the academic composition in other countries is vastly different than in the US, but many of those schools have myriad of other problems that US educators would also cringe at.
Regardless, a good read.
January 21st, 2012 at 9:30 AM ^
a little while ago, it was the center of the page with a picture of Ohio fans. The article also mentions James Duberstadt.
January 22nd, 2012 at 3:39 PM ^
I can argue the truth behind this article. Being from new jersey, I probably never would have gone to Michigan had it not been for the winged helmet.
January 21st, 2012 at 10:28 AM ^
At a lot of colleges, athletics is the tail wagging the dog. It sure is great to be a Wolverine where the academic programs don't have to take a back seat to athletics no matter how good or popular the athletic programs may be. And the B1G seems to be the only major conference that is as interested in academics as athletics when considering adding teams.
And you're right to point out the absurdity of extrapolating from a short time period at Oregon to all of athletics.
I almost fell out of my chair at the part about Duke using the Lacrosse witch hunt debacle as an excuse to examine the athletic program. It should have been a lesson in examining the idiotic "academicians" who were calling for the Lacross players' heads on poles because a false story fit their skewed preconceptions.
January 21st, 2012 at 2:30 PM ^
I think you're mistaken about why the Duke lacrosse reference was stupid. It wasn't necessarily academics (or 'academicians') who led the charge there, first of all. But more importantly, it doesn't make any sense to use a very small-time, non-revenue sport in the broader context of the article. Good luck trying to assert that the lacrosse program had simply become bigger than the institution itself, even at a place like Duke.
January 21st, 2012 at 3:38 PM ^
We seem to be talking about two different issues. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. You're talking about it being stupid to use the Duke lacrosse debacle in the article at all (I certainly agree with you here). I'm talking about the way Duke officials used the situation to claim the sports programs needed to have greater control from the academic side of the university. From the very beginning, many of the academicians (or academics) acted more like they were leading a lynch mob than anything else. And as time went on, as it became apparent that the prosecution had no case, there was still the "group of 88" profesors who refused to back down.
You are right, using a dozen or so lacrosse players to make claims about athletics in general is absurd, especially when a group of nearly 100 professors seems not to get the same attention about any waywardness on the academic side.
January 21st, 2012 at 10:46 AM ^
college. For example, when I was in school my mother and grandfather died. Their respective deaths had an impact upon how I performed in the classroom. Other people deal with mental health issues, financial problems, pregnancies, etc. To single out athletics as a distraction is to ignore the plethora of issues that plague students everywhere. Students are human beings afterall. They have the same problems that the general populace has.
Articles like this only highlight the fact that many academics live far too much in a world of theory and too little in the world the rest of us live in. I think these people ought to stop writing books and start interacting with their students. Maybe then they'll understand that athletics is far from being the greatest distraction that confronts students.
January 21st, 2012 at 10:54 AM ^
I was thinking the same thing. Students are affected by so many outside forces that to single out athletics as some horrible force weighing down performance in the classroom is myopic.
I hate to trade in the same stereotypes that many of the professors cited did, but to hear a couple of english and anthropology professors complain about sports strikes me as an incompatible audience complaining about a topic that they never cared to understand.
January 21st, 2012 at 1:02 PM ^
It's funny. Undergraduates are more interested in sports than in what their professors have to teach them, and the professors (who are theoretically "experts" at teaching) assume that it's all the kids' fault. Could it possibly be that delivering bland lectures to 300-400 people, who are required to passively take notes for 60-90 minutes, is not the ideal way to impart knowledge?
For decades now, state universities have been treating their undergraduates like chattel while focusing their energies on gaining research grants. If they don't like how the students are performing, they should take a look in the mirror.
January 21st, 2012 at 1:40 PM ^
Just two things to note on this:
At a place like UM, the attraction is that the faculty you are being taught by are experts in their research areas (not in teaching), meaning that you are getting taught by someone who is creating knowledge at the edge of what's known in the area and this person can (theoretically) decide what's best for you to know right now. Faculty at a research university are given somewhere between little to no training as educators. If you want someone who's an expert at teaching, there are a lot of schools where you would find a higher percentage of the faculty are really good educators. But, these places will have almost no research program. It's a value judegement the students have to make about which kind of school to go to.
Also, the economics of a major university are very different now than they were even 20 years ago. A major research university has only a small fraction of its expenses covered by tuition, and raising research money is critical for their budgets. To say that faculty at a place like UM should stop spending so much time writing research grants is really saying that you don't want UM to exist in the way it does today. Most people who haven't worked in the field have no idea how much pressure faculty members are under to raise research funds (including to pay some fraction of their own salary), as well as doing "service" activities for the university (and outside) that are unpaid. I'm not saying disagreeing with what you're fundamentally saying (I actually agree very much with the basic notion that we should be changing the way we teach...in fact many of us are doing just that).
January 21st, 2012 at 2:39 PM ^
research is a major distraction keeping the professors from teaching the students.
And thus we should all attend colleges where the is no research and no athletics, and only focus on studying. Of course both the professors and the students would be bored out of their minds.
This is all bull shit. I chose Michigan over the Naval Academy, and Webb Institute to study Naval Architecture because it offered a great education, and that education came well rounded with the opportunity to have a social life which included football Saturdays.
And I agree with the poster about lecture sizes above, in that I know the classes I retained less learning in were the ones that were required with a big lecture, and then breakouts with assistants who did not speak English very well, or ones where the professor was not a very good at teaching undergraduate students.
Prof. Hendel's Physics lectures, with the rocket launches into the crowd (somehow aimed at dozing students) and so forth ... Prof. Woodward and Sulzer diesels, well those ones I remember. (They were the good teachers.)
January 21st, 2012 at 3:03 PM ^
I think that's too much of a leading question. Most people have the mindset that research takes away time from what professors should be doing, which is teaching undergraduate classes. At a research university like UM, the professors are probably being told explicitly that "teaching" is something like 40% of their job (a common metric is the rest is 40% research and 20% service to the school and profession), and that is probably split between teaching undergraduate and graduate classes. So, one the one hand people tend to complain about research taking away from teaching, and on the other hand the faculty are probably being told explicilty that something like 20% of their time should be spent teaching undergrads. Does that mean research is "distracting" them from teaching undergrads?
I think you've misunderstood my comments. I loved my time at UM, and as I said other places, I irrationally follow UM football and love it as much as anyone else on the board. I wouldn't trade my expeirence for anything. But, it is a little weak to choose to go to a major research school (with the expectations on the faculty I mentioned above), and then complain because the faculty are doing too much research and not spending the time and getting trained to be better teachers. If they did what you asked for (spent less time on research and more on teaching), the reputation of the school (which we are all proud of here) would suffer.
January 21st, 2012 at 4:25 PM ^
the very same academics that are arguing sports degrade learning, probably feel much different about research degrading undergraduate learning.
In fact both probably do, however both also have other benefits. And for what little they degrade learning, the trade offs are worth it to some people. (Sounds like me and you included.)
January 21st, 2012 at 2:50 PM ^
I'm aware of all the financial realties and such. It's just funny that at every other level of education, if students don't perform it's assumed to be the teachers' fault, but if college students don't perform the university somehow gets a free pass and people search for excuses ("It's sports! It's the culture! It's drinking!"). Maybe some of it lies on the profs' shoulders. The gigantic lecture format is simply not ideal. Sitting passively and taking notes while one person talks for 90 minutes is not engaging. I was a pretty motivated student, but I definitely got much, much more out of my discussion sections (at least when the GSI could speak English) than from lectures.
January 21st, 2012 at 3:13 PM ^
I don't disagree with you. If you asked me or any of my colleagues to choose between a 300 person lecture and a 20 person class where we could have more interaction, almost everyone would choose the second. Economics plays into that. How do you pay for all the people necessary to teach those classes? If you use cheaper people, you have less qualified people (at least by their credentials, which may have nothing to do with teaching ability), and this will hurt the reputation of your program.
There is a lot we can do to improve higher education (and you might be glad to know that there are changes being made in some places and in some fields). So I agree that faculty in general have not always done what they could to provide the best educational experience with the available resources. But, one reason this educational stage might bring more criticism of the students is because for the first time, 1) it is their choice to be there, and 2) they are in control of their choices about how to spend their time out of class. These are both great things (and a great education about life), but it does put more of the onus on the students. I can't make them come to class. I understand the arguments about "making things more engaging", but there is a certain fraction of students right now that would not show up to class (or would not take their eyes off facebook) even if I lit myself on fire at the front of the room.
January 21st, 2012 at 7:21 PM ^
January 21st, 2012 at 1:28 PM ^
I think one difference here is that while there are a lot of events that can have a distracting effect (like the ones you mention), atheletics is a major one that the universities themselves choose to participate in. They can't very well control a death you have in the family, but they could choose not to have a football team. I love UM football as much as anyone here, and I would never wish for it to go away. But, with all of the issues surrounding college atheletics (I'm mainly thinking of football and basketball here), I do think it is becoming harder to justify that these major atheletic endeavors are consistent with the mission of the university.
Also, I see this first hand with my students, so I will note that a major football program is most certainly a distraction. In the fall semester, 6-8 weeks have home football games (and 2-3 of those will be "major" games). Where there are games (especially major games), it is very clear that students are less engaged in their classes. In fact, I bet I could tell you which weeks have major football games by looking at the scores on the homework due the following week. I am all for the idea that college is about learning a lot more than what's taught in classes, but it's pretty hard when you see people's performance suffer (sometimes drastically, making them very angry at the professor) not to wonder whether this endeavor is consistent with the academic mission of the university.
January 21st, 2012 at 11:18 AM ^
Back in the 50's and 60's nearly every varsity athelete registered for the Introductory Astronomy class taught by Dr. Hazel Losh. Rumor had it that her grading scale was A for athlete, B for boys and C for coeds. She was proudly escorted under The Banner at every game by the captain who was at least 2 feet taller and 150 pounds heavier than her. As they say, "The crowd went wild!"
Those too young to remember this remarkable lady may want to read the SI article written after we beat that school from down south to earn a trip to the Rose Bowl in 1964.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1076667/inde…
At the pep rally on the Diag the night before the game Doc Losh is quoted as saying
"Remember this. Scholarship is not the only important thing at Michigan. Go Blue!"
January 21st, 2012 at 12:12 PM ^
Wow, we think we had it rough under RR. In the 50's and early 60's, Michigan went 14 years without a Big Ten Championship and 9 years without a victory over Sparty.
And yet the program survived and later thrived. Things do run in cycles.
January 21st, 2012 at 11:35 AM ^
Here's the truth, which many students have figured out but their professors are loath to admit: your college GPA, your major, your courseload - most of that stuff ultimately doesn't matter in the big picture. For most people, all that really matters in the post-college world is that they have a college degree. Where they went to school can help, too. But what they actually did while they were in college will ultimately be pretty irrelevant. Future employers are not going to care what your courseload was sophomore year. That's not to say that you should blow off your studies, but they don't have to be your sole focus when you're in college. It's OK to go to sporting events and have fun, too.
I will say, though, that having students camp out for seats (which can cause them to miss class) always struck me as dumb. I like that our students don't have to go through that.
January 21st, 2012 at 12:17 PM ^
It helps in your first job interview. After your first year on the job, what counts for evermore is your work experience.
As a Manager, I interview dozens of people a year for non-entry level positions. I have never once asked anybody about their GPA or even their major.
January 21st, 2012 at 11:20 AM ^
What a lot of academics don't understand is that when their university's sports teams win, it increases their university's overall name recognition. When their university's has a well known brand, it helps them when research grants are awarded.
A lot of academics complain about sports coaches being paid high salaries. They fail to recognize that when coaches are being paid well, it raises the salary benchmark for all university employees.
Academics are like a barrel of crabs trying to get out. Instead of helping each other escape, they drag down the ones that climb to the top of the barrel.
January 21st, 2012 at 12:14 PM ^
Not so sure the branding helps in the research area that much--just look at some of the SEC schools. The branding helps in luring students and alumni donations-- not so much in research grants.
January 21st, 2012 at 12:24 PM ^
My wife went to Emory, then transferred to Duke. Of course, I knew all about Duke, but I was surprised to find out how good of a school Emory is.
What was the difference? The free advertising and branding that winning D1 sports provide.
If Emory had the basketball team and Duke had nothing, Emory would be on everyones lips as an elite national program - for both academics and sports. There are direct tangible benefits when this happens.
January 21st, 2012 at 2:05 PM ^
I totally agree MDog, that atheletics has a huge impact that affects public perception (that's part of the reason I chose UM). For an academically focused school (like Duke or Emory), investment in athemetics is a really complex issue. Rice is another good example. They have a fantastic academic reputation, and they compete in D1 sports. Their football team had significant success at one point, but it is likely they never will achieve that same level again due to the combination of their academic requirements and their size (they are WAY smaller than Stanford, for example).
A few times they have gone through a huge review of their atheletic programs, and some significant fraction of the faculty advocated for acknowledging the situation and moving the football team to a lower (and cheaper) division. I don't understand all the rules here, but apparently you can't do this piecemeal, and all sports have to move together. They do have a baseball team that has won national championships in the last few years (and is very popular with alumni). Essentially, one of the main arguments that has kept football in D1 (and costing a ton of money for a non-competitive team) is that they want to keep their D1 baseball team.
So, another point to illustrate that atheletics (and especially football) is a complex issue for academically-minded schools.
January 21st, 2012 at 2:19 PM ^
For an academically focused school (like Duke or Emory), investment in athemetics is a really complex issue.
"[A]themetics" is such a great word; we need a definition for it. How about "the empirical study of the effects of intercollegiate athletics on university communities..."?
January 21st, 2012 at 1:52 PM ^
With all due respect m1817, you have no idea what you're talking about.
1) M-Dog is right that an atheletic program helps with reputation for students and in the general public, but this has absolutely nothing to do with getting research grants. The people evaluating and making funding decisions know very well the scientific history and reputations of the people making the applications (and the technical reputation of the specific department at the specific school if the individual doesn't happen to be known). Depending on which area you work in, schools with no atheletic programs can actually have the strongest technical reputations. Bottom line, it's not the general public making these decisions, and the people who are making the decisions are too highly informed to have a reputation based on atheletics play into this.
2) The salary of a head coach has no impact on the salaries of the other faculty and staff at a university. If anything, based on observations of my own state and institution, I would guess it actually works the other way. When state budgets are tight, large salaries for coaches get discussed in the newspaper and the legislature. Many people don't understand how separate the academic and atheletic budgets are, so this large salary is seen as an example of excess funds at the university and a reason to further reduce state funding to the school (causing either tuition to rise or more effort to be made in securing research grants).
This is all from experience. I am a UM alum, and a professor in a science/engineering/technology/math discipline at a school of comparable reputation. I write and review research grants for all of the major agencies that fund federally sponsored research.
January 21st, 2012 at 11:59 AM ^
Everyone knows where Duke stands in the academic order. I don't want to give it any extra attention, but I think its inclusion in that article clearly shows that the Sportsfest includes all levels. Stanford, too, was mentioned. Gives the article more credibility ... sometimes the NYT will tiptoe around its reader base and associate vaguely troubling trends only with public schools in flyover country.
January 21st, 2012 at 12:06 PM ^
Two points.
1) The article gives the sense college kids going to sporting events has become a huge problem in recent years. It could have been written 20 years ago about me at Michigan or a friend of mine at Duke. It might shock the authors to find out that we both survived and are doing quite well, thank you.
2) There is a value judgment underlying this article. Let's agree that college kids do not spend every waking moment either in class or studying. Thus, college sports is not taking away study time. Rather, it is one of the many, many non-academic opportunites that are available for a college student . (In my opinion, a student who is going to blow off a paper to go to a game would blow off that paper regardless. He or she would just find something else to do if the sporting event didn't exist.) Thus, the negative light given to sports attendance is just a value judgment on how others use their time. I am sure that the professors subjectively believe that it is better to go to a play than a football game. However, the facts are that the same about of studying (zero) gets done at both events. I would also argue that, in the placed called the real world, I have gotten more out of talking to clients about how I saw Desmond's catch against ND than any play I ever went to. (Yes, I actually went to a play while a student. Ok, OK, I was trying to date a girl in the play, but it still counts.)
January 21st, 2012 at 12:28 PM ^
Did you get any dates with her?
If not, I hope you didn't have to miss any games to go to her plays.
January 21st, 2012 at 12:43 PM ^
I was just trying to add a bit of humor.
January 21st, 2012 at 1:06 PM ^
Exactly what I was thinking. If students didn't have sports to distract them, they would find something else to do. Only a select few schools have students who are always studying and doing nothing else. Sports get targeted because there is a lot of money in them and people (read: professors) think that it is irrational to be so passionate about them. Well, students would definitely find other distractions. You are at college to get an education, but it's not the only thing you're going to do there.
January 21st, 2012 at 1:09 PM ^
the first topic I've seen on this site where I have vehemetley disagreed with the opinion of the status quo. I loved my time at Michigan, I loved my classes, I loved the people I met, and I loved going to sporting events. But I do agree with most of the points in the NYT article. I pour over this website daily to learn about recruiting, read postgame analysis, and just bathe in the rumor mill. But, I know that this is just a hobby for me. (one that I love)
To me, most of the people on this site have always come off as intelligent, passionate, and successfull. This is one of the reasons why I love it here. But I don't think we are necessarily the norm of college sports fans. Maybe my frustration is more geared toward the culture of drinking, maybe it is about the people who--as others have said--were going to blow off academics anyway, but I think sports can be an unhealthy outlet for a lot of people. In my time at Michigan, I met many people who aren't where they wanted to be today.
Some of me feels like the Times article was unfairly putting the blame on just one activity. (even if that activity controls an ungodly amount of money, which...I'm not going to touch this one. This can of worms is big enough to eat me.) But when I am on college campuses I often find myself looking around at people in bewildermint. If you aren't going to go to class, won't mainly focus on school, and don't want to take advantage of the academics--why are you here? Why are you spending 4 (more?) years and huge sums of tuition money to be here?
January 21st, 2012 at 1:10 PM ^
My other big issue with the article is that the academics quoted complain that sports are a non-productive use of time for the students, and act as if a university should be some efficient factory for producing well-rounded intellectual citizens. Yet, that hasn't been the case for universities in decades, if ever. Schools exist to teach people only as much as they are willing to invest in, and are not governed by the need to maximize resource usage to output; they are, with few exceptions, horrifically inefficient at meeting their stated goals. That's okay, of course, because even an inefficieny model still leads to hundreds of thousands of young people being educated and pumped into the economy.
But if universities were run efficiently (as some of the respondents intimate they should), we probably wouldn't have sporting events (at least non-revenue sports), but we also would not have "cash-losing" fields of study. Most universities would focus on medicine, law, business, and the hard sciences over all other - those consistently produce money-making professions and bring in research dollars and lead to money-making inventions. Most of the liberal arts would disappear, as they produce individuals with useful skills but not necessarily ones rewarded in the marketplace. And so that would mean the number of the anthropology, english, history, etc. professors would be severely reduced as well, and salaries of those that remain would also be cut.
So I guess my point is that while I do agree that the ludicrous salaries being paid to assistant coaches and athletic trainers are troubling for institutions with limited budgets, they are still more of a positive to the bottom line than many of the other programs that academic institutions keep around.
January 21st, 2012 at 1:47 PM ^
I went from undergrad at Michigan to getting my MA at a decidedly non-football institution, the University of Chicago. Who, as many of you might know, tanked its big-time football program in the 30s in an attempt to reform the school away from being known for football. They turned the football stadium into an atomic collider. But I digress.
Anyways, at the opening meeting for our program, the first sentence out of the program director's mouth was a stuffy joke about how UC wasn't some school where people sulked around on Mondays because the football team lost. Which was followed up with a warning to those of us who came from such schools that it was time to put that out of our heads.
Long story short, there are many profs, and some schools, who will never understand the appeal of big-time athletics. And who will tailor their entire world-view to that opinion. And then there's Michigan, where both the academic and athletic worlds can coexist quite nicely.
It's their loss. I sulked around the UC campus on Mondays a lot when I was there because of Michigan football, and still managed to do perfectly well in school.
January 21st, 2012 at 1:52 PM ^
has been on-going for over 100 years. Many academics would not allow football on campus as a varsity sport because it would take away from the school, not add to it. Mr. Yost won a hard-fought battle against the elitists of his day.
For the first 50 years of Michigan football, our main rival was.......University of Chicago. Yes that IS true. UC has more conference titles in FB than sparty. But in 1936 UC cancelled football to focus on academics because that was important. UC is a very highly ranked school, primarily due to UC being a private school.
However, is UC better than UM? No. Their undergrad is ranked higher but our graduate programs are ranked higher. So this debate will continue for the next 100 years.
January 21st, 2012 at 2:37 PM ^
UC is a much different kind of school than Michigan. Very, very different. Large public, liberal research university versus fiercly private, conservative, theory-heavy university. It's apples and oranges. Vastly different approaches to undergraduate education, and for graduate programs, each has a handful of programs which have fundamentally defined their fields.
For my money, having attended both, and seen the kind of academic work produced and expected at each, I'd say they're about the same in rigor and prestige, yet fundamentally disparate in their means of going about it.
January 21st, 2012 at 3:00 PM ^
January 21st, 2012 at 7:09 PM ^
I was in Baton Rouge this Fall, and got to go to a game (LSU v. W. Kentucky -- not marquee I admit). From what i was told, the libraries close there on home game dates. That seems extreme and would never happen at Michigan. Although on the handful of games I missed as an undergrad to catch up on schoolwork I'll admit the libraries were not very busy.
January 21st, 2012 at 7:48 PM ^
Yet in some ways this was Woody's finest hour. There was an ugly mood on campus. This was before the campus riots of the later sixties, but it was something of an augury of things to come. The team had played its heart out to go to the Rose Bowl. The entire Columbus establishment (and Columbus, remember, is the State capital) felt that the team belonged to them, and to Ohio, and not to the rotten outsiders who by a quirk of fate had had the power to vote them down. But Woody stood against them. Before a great rally — in the light of the bonfire in which the crowd would gladly have immolated the objects of their anger — Woody defended the faculty. They had done their duty as they saw it, and we must accept the decision of the vote, he said. What they represented in the life of the university, he told the angry crowd, was far more important than the football program. He told the crowd to disperse, and the students to go back to their books. That ended the matter. Woody was a team player, and the university was his team. There was neither bitterness nor condescension in his manner. And I never heard of him complaining about it afterwards.